


Adhesion

by Metronomeblue



Series: imagine me & you- forever [9]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Aftermath, Aftermath of Violence, Canon Disabled Character, Coping, Disability, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eye Trauma, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growth, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Insecurity, Language of Flowers, Oral Sex, Post-Canon, Post-War, Recovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Indulgent, enucleation, in the chapter titles at least, that's a good one for this lmao
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 11:42:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13903290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue
Summary: "There was a time when Shunsui had known what to do. Before the war, before both wars, he’d been so certain of the world. Certain of himself, and his place in it."///In the aftermath of the final arc, Shunsui comes to terms with the things he's lost. S/o helps.





	Adhesion

**Author's Note:**

> Uhh I guess some body horror here what with his losing an eye and it being rather... traumatic? But mostly this is about feelings and coping and all that fun stuff.

There was a time when Shunsui had known what to do. Before the war, before both wars, he’d been so certain of the world. Certain of himself, and his place in it. Certain that with each breath nothing would change too much. After his brother, his sister-in-law. After Lisa, after Aizen, he perhaps should have changed his thinking. But he hadn’t. Each breath brought a new hope, each day a new terror to face. And that was fine. That was good. The world never changed too much beyond what he could handle.

But now the world was spun off of its axis in so many, many ways. Yama-jii was gone. Sasakibe and so many others. Jushiro… Jushiro was gone, too. His right eye. His balance. His certainty. He had lost a great deal between one breath and the next, and the weight of what he hadn’t fell heavy on him. His place wasn’t at the Eighth anymore. The haori he’d worn for a thousand years was folded and placed on a shelf, the heat from his body leaving it as quickly as it had left him.

“Captain-Commander,” Nanao called him from the door, her mouth drawn and face pale.

“Now, now, Nanao-chan,” he chided her, but softly. Tiredly. She looked away. “You look as if you’ve been working far too hard.” He sighed. “Go home, get some sleep.” He could only see all of her if he turned his head far to the right. Too far. It felt unnatural. He looked back to his paperwork, one hand straying up to the pitch black where once his eye was.

“Captain-Commander, I-” His hand fell.

“Go home, Nanao,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. Then, softer. “You’ll get nothing done today, the way you’ve been sleeping.” She nodded, turned. Paused, then turned back.

“With all due respect, Captain Commander, you should go home, too. You have somebody waiting for you.” She swept away in a flush of cold air and concern, and he tried to be grateful she was gone.

He failed at that, too.

He did go home, eventually. In the blue light of the new morning, he made his way through the streets, stepping quietly from rooftop to rooftop, thoughts blank and body moving automatically. He didn’t want to imagine the look on her face when she saw him. Didn’t want to think of what she’d say when she saw him, what words of blame or disgust or fear she’d have for him. Didn’t want to think of how right she might be. He came to his own door- their door- before he knew it, and by the time his mind had caught up to his body, he was reaching out to open it.

She wasn’t home. There was a hollow feeling in his chest that was half-relief, half-disappointment. He closed the door behind him, an ache seeping into his body as if he’d suddenly remembered it. Maybe he had. A quick stop at the Fourth following the battle hadn’t done much beyond further enforce his fears. Kotetsu- Captain Kotetsu, now, poor woman, had examined him quickly enough, deemed him to be healing well enough to return to light duties after a period of rest. They’d taken what was left of his eye after he’d been injured. He had only flashes of that time in his memory. Retsu’s face, staring down at him, steely and comforting all at once. Jushiro’s division wailing and murmuring so loudly he could hear them lying in his hospital bed. The burn of light on his other eye, the ache of bruising around the empty socket- and it hadn’t been empty, before, there’d been a smoldering clot of nerves and  _blood_ , and empty _empty_  his eye was _gone they’d taken his eye and he wanted it back he wanted_ -

But that was in the past. That was all in the past. Between one breath and the next, and the next breath had come and gone. He should have been able to move on. He should have been stronger than that. Instead he felt like a child again, sitting and waiting on a hospital bed for someone who might never return. He sighed, then looked up when he heard footsteps. It was two nurses, not Captain Kotetsu, and he relaxed again. They stopped away from his door, but he could hear them. They weren’t quiet.

“How horrible,” one of the nurses had whispered to another outside the door. “And he used to be so handsome.” She snuck a look at the closed, sunken eyelid, her judgemental, repulsed face flashing like a match before his remaining eye. The thought of  _her_  looking at him like that, of her seeing him for what he was now… He began to unknot the ties of the eyepatch, hurriedly preparing to replace it. He didn’t want to risk that look again.

“His poor lover,” the other one had sighed. “How can she even bear to look at him without covering it up?” His fingers trembled on the soft fabric, struggling to cover his shame, to smooth over the torn edges of his soul with a black patch. Pressing the fabric to the still-healing nerves of his eye was painful, but less so than remaining exposed. The open air ached on his skin. Their words fell heavy in his heart.

“I’ll bet she can’t,” the first nurse laughed. “Probably closes her eyes to kiss him because she can’t stand to see.” He grit his teeth, fumbling with the ties behind his head, struggling to tie it off as quickly as possible, hide his shame and hurt beneath black silk. It wasn’t as though there was anything worth seeing underneath it. 

“Can you imagine how  _disgusted_  she must be?” the other one whispered, a thrill of malicious glee filing her voice. “She’s only in it for the prestige now. What with his being Captain-Commander and all.” _It wasn’t true_ , he told himself. But it would be a lie to say the thought hadn’t occurred to him. She wouldn’t. He knew her, he _loved_ her, she wouldn’t. But the thought pricked at him.

“Closes her eyes and thinks of the money while she rides his cock,” the first nurse agreed waspishly. “Mind you, for the Kyoraku name… Even I might be able to tolerate that  _gaping wound_  looming over me every time we fucked.” The pang of hurt those words sent trembling through him was unexpected. Their opinions shouldn’t matter. They didn’t know her. They only knew  _of_  him. But the shade of a thought had grown to a fear in his heart, a throb of  _what if what if what if_ that cried out at the thought of her hatred, her disgust.

Her hiding it.

He’d left the Fourth as soon as possible, practically fleeing with the speed of his shunpo. The nurses had fled too, once Kotetsu had come back to dismiss him for good, hand him a salve and instructions for rinsing his eye. He hadn’t read them yet. Hadn’t so much as glanced at them since he’d shoved them into his robes and run. They were there now, between his haori and the black of his robes, but only because he knew it would worry Nanao if he left them in his office. He set his hat down on a table by the door, pulled off his haori with the ginger care of a man who was suddenly uncertain of himself. It took him three tries to hang it on its hook on his side of the bed, and even so the sight of the thick, condemning  _one_  on the back startled him.

He still wasn’t used to the new world.

A sharp spike of pain lanced through his right eye- through the space where it used to be.  _Gaping wound_ , the nurse’s sneer danced before his eyes, echoed in his ears. His fingertips grazed the black silk, pressed gingerly on the flesh beneath, the pit of his empty eye socket beneath, the feeling of  _wrongness_  as his eyelid went ever-so-slightly concave under the pressure of his touch. He could feel the nerve, the muscle and tissue beginning to fill the space where his eye used to be. He could feel the weight of his own skin on his muscle on his skull on his soul, like a reverberation of pain that rippled out. He pulled his hand away.

His skin itched with the foreign feelings in his skull, and he began to undress slowly. Undoing his sash took longer than it should have, his fingers losing track of their places, tangling in the periwinkle silk, forgetting their task. Pulling off his shitage was difficult, and his feet tripped over his hakama as he tried to take them off. When he bent over to move them a wave of vertigo overcame him, his mind going blank with pain and confusion, and he had to pause, to reassess what he had meant to do in the first place. He walked into the bathroom, stopped in the doorway. Across from him lay the bathtub, sunk deep into the ground, accessible by a set of slick steps. He turned to the right, and the black half of his vision moved until he could see the mirror. Until he could see himself. His body remained much the same, and a cursory glance reassured him of its sameness, but when he met his own eyes in the mirror he was forced to turn entirely. **  
  
**The black eyepatch was stark against his pale face. It was yawning, gaping black where an eye used to be. It sent an uneasy feeling through him, a sick twist in his stomach like instinct, like a push to do something. It reminded him of something, that black void. Something that put him into a position of alertness, that made him focus, that- and it hit him, suddenly and sharply. His hand crept up to cover the black, his heart pounding, his other hand twitching.

It looked like a hollow hole.

There, then, with his fingers over it, it looked fine. Unassuming. Covered by skin and made small by contrast. But when his hand fell away, it bloomed like empty space over his eye. A reminder of what he lacked. The press of emptiness ached under the patch, and though his fingers twitched up to undo the ties, they fell again because what was under it would be worse. He undid his ponytail, laid the pinwheel hair pins in a bowl on the counter. Laid the silk he used to pin up his hair beside it. His fingers moved to the ties of the eyepatch, but instead he adjusted them to settle over his unbound hair.

The shower was hot, sweet relief on his aching muscles. It eased pains he hadn’t known he had, and soothed a part of him that had been unsettled. But he was still weak, so weak, with exhaustion and grief and loss, and after a time his knees began to shake. He stepped out of the shower and sighed, the pain returning with the cold of the morning air. There were spare yukata on a shelf by the mirror, but the idea of looking himself in the eye again was daunting, so he wrapped a towel around his waist instead, staring straight ahead as he picked up his things and returned to the bedroom.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and the pressure of all that had happened bent him forward, his elbows digging into his thighs, his face in his hands, his hair dripping dark and curling over his skin. If he wept, nobody would know. He tried. He failed. No tears came, despite the building pressure behind his eye, the overwhelming feeling of loss burning in his heart. He sat, silent and bent, trying to forget that anything had changed. Breathing slow.

But one breath became the next, and the light began to turn gold with the rising sun.

She came home.

She always opened the door quietly. It was a slight fumble at the lock, the slide of the bolt, a single hard step, and then a soft padding as she made her way to the bedroom. He should have left. The soft gasp from the doorway was choked with feeling, and he had to force himself not to look up. Not to make the end come any faster. The look in her eyes, he knew, would be the end of him. The horror, the shock which would fade into disgust and revulsion. He heard her come closer, and he bent lower, praying his hair would cover his eye just a moment longer. Just one more moment, he asked. One more. She stopped in front of him, stepped closer. A single breath, and then-

“Shunsui,” she sobbed, and the shaky, desperate way she clutched his head to her chest was painful. “I couldn’t find you. They told me you’d been wounded, and then I couldn’t find you, and then they told me you were at the First, but they said you came home and-” She swallowed her fear, her stomach trembling where his forehead pressed against it. “Oh, Shunsui.”

“I’m alright,” he said, curling one arm around her waist, bringing her closer. “I just couldn’t come home, before.” She leaned into his touch, her chest still shuddering with each breath. He traced slow circles on her back, breathed slowly, trying to calm her with what small gestures he could. She swallowed, thick with fear she hadn’t quite released.

“They told me you were wounded,” she repeated, and he knew she felt him stiffen, felt his hand stop before it began to move again. He said nothing, though. Just breathed. Just touched her softly, taking in the warmth of her. “Shunsui,” she begged, and he pulled away, gathering what small bravery he had left in his heart. He looked up at her, and the small, pained noise she made to see the eyepatch set him on edge.

“It’s all rather startling, isn’t it?” He asked calmly. She reached out, and he let her, feeling the barest brush of her fingers over the silk. Her brow furrowed, and she pulled her hand away to look at it. The water on her hand was warm from his skin.

“Shunsui?” She asked, and he shook his head. Realization struck her, and her eyes narrowed. “Take it off,” she said quietly, her face serious. When he opened his mouth to object, her finger pressed gently to his lips. “Shunsui,” she said, still quiet, still calm, but an order now. “Take it off.” He sighed, and the touch of her skin to his was a crack in his fragile mask of nonchalance. His shoulders fell, his face loosened, his hands came up to his face. He could feel the difference like that, the firm skin and whole eye under one hand, the soft, sunken wreck of the empty eye socket beneath the other. His hands slid off of his eyes, reached up to his hair to undo the ties. They were tight, hard from the water, and he struggled. He made a sound of frustration. There was a cool touch on his hands and he released the ties to her care. She unknotted them slowly, making sure not to be too quick or rough, careful of him. Gentle as ever. When he felt the fabric loosen, the silk peel from his face, wet and heavy, he bent his head again, and it fell to the floor. He closed both eyes.

He awaited her judgement.  _Gaping wound_ , the nurse’s voice echoed in his head. Her hands were cool and soft under his chin, and he flinched away from them. She didn’t pull back, though, simply waited a moment before catching his face between them. She tilted his head back, up, until she could see it clearly. He heard her breath catch in her chest when she saw the scar, the lack, the way his eyelid caved in without an eye to hold it up. He braced himself. He waited. She sighed, and the gentlest touch pulled a lock of dark hair from his face.

“Look at me,” she whispered. “Oh, love, please. Look at me.”

He did. He expected the nurse’s face, somehow. Superimposed over her own, sneering and dismissive and revolted. But there was no nurse. She looked like herself. She looked… sad. Pained, and horrified, but mostly just sad. Her eyes roamed over the sweep of his ruined eye, the bruising dark on his cheekbone and temple, the deep lines around his mouth. Slowly, steadily, they examined him, paying as much attention to the smallest scrape on his cheek to the near-fatal loss of his eye.

“I know,” he said after a moment, his voice a low rasp. “I’m-”

“Shut up,” she said, sharply, and he was taken aback by the anger in her voice. His mind flashed to its own worst conjurings, but then she sighed, softened, pressed his head to her chest once more. “I thought you were  _dead_ ,” she admitted. “I thought I would bury you and Jushiro together.” He blinked his one eye. It had never occurred to him that she wouldn’t have known. That she would have had any cause to worry for him and him alone. “This is better,” she murmured, her hands tangling in his hair. “It’s awful, but it’s better.”

“Is it?” he asked wryly, pulling back. 

“ _It is to me_ ,” she insisted painfully. She rested a knee beside his thigh, settled easily over his hips. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he bent into her touch like a flower to the sun. “Would it hurt?” She asked suddenly, quietly. “If I were to touch it?” He looked up at her, saw the open worry in her face, and shook his head. “Good,” she murmured, before she leaned in to press a kiss to the center of his sunken eyelid. He shuddered, one hand reaching up to press the back of her head in closer, tangling his fingers in her hair. It was a familiar feeling, a sensation of countless nights, made new by the pain she swept away with every gentle touch. Her lips made a path across his cheekbone, up to his temple, over his brow. Over the aching emptiness of his right eye. Velvet-soft and as gentle as the morning light around them, her kiss banished a measure of his fear. Like absolution. Benediction. Unconditional and unrestrained. Love.

The next time she broke away, he tilted his face up to catch her lips with his own, to try and return that acceptance, that love. Her lips warmed on his, blood flushing her cheeks, and he smiled to feel it. He tilted her enough that he could reach down without breaking their kiss. He could feel himself swelling under her, burgeoning with heat and blood and the taste of her. She giggled, righting herself and breaking away to look at him.

“What are you doing?” She asked, breathless and curious. He looked down at the eyepatch, then up at her. His smile turned, and hers fell from her lips.

“Well, blossom, I’d hate for you to be forced to look into a gaping wound while we…” He trailed off, but the bitter, pained smile on his face said enough. She swallowed and shook her head, her throat tight with pain and anger. Her cool, gentle fingers pulled stray locks of hair from his face, measured, careful movements that traced the violet lines of bruising without pressing down too hard on them.

“It’s a scar, Shunsui,” she said softly, curling her fingers around his own, crushing the black silk between their two hands. “It’s a part of you. And there’s not a single part of you I could hate.”

“I’m afraid I don’t believe that,” he replied softly, running one pensive hand through her hair.

“Then let me prove it to you,” she said. There was a strange, angry note in her voice, but more than that, there was hurt. For herself, for him, at the thought of him doubting her, he couldn’t say. She pulled back, eyes soft and welling with tears, but unflinching when they gazed into his. “Let me prove it,” she asked. He nodded, mute with feelings he wasn’t sure he could name. She pulled the eyepatch from his hand and let it fall to the floor. She pushed him back just enough for her to rise up off of his lap and step back. “Don’t put it back on,” she told him. He nodded slowly. She undid her obi, opened her kimono just enough that it fluttered around her legs when she knelt between his knees. She smiled, wicked and knowing, at his visible erection under the towel. She undid the half-knot holding the towel closed, and he had to work not to moan when her hand first grasped him. His eyelid dropped, his lips parted at the cool softness of her hand on his heated flesh. The first few strokes were soft, becoming firmer, gaining the measure of him. He sighed, and his muscles relaxed, dropped, slipped away. He remained sitting only through luck.

“Oh, petal, you really shouldn’t-” he sighed as she gained momentum, his eye fluttering closed, but then she stopped, suddenly, abruptly.

“Don’t look away,” she said. The steely grip of her hand on his cock was at once both pleasant and torturous. Her other hand slid up to his stomach, fingers gliding through the tangle of dark hair that stretched up from his groin. “Shunsui,” she ordered him. “Look at me.”

Her hair was spilling over her shoulders, her lips were flushed and spit-shiny, parted, and her eyes were bright and fierce when they met his. Never looking away, never breaking eye contact, she bent down and slid his cock into her mouth. His hips would have bucked into her mouth, but her hand held him down, keeping him still while she bobbed her head back and forth on his cock. He groaned, every muscle tensing. She didn’t break away from his gaze, either, just stared him down as she pressed so far forward that he could swear he felt her swallow around him. She pulled back, and the air on his wet flesh was another kind of sensation. The lower part of his shaft cold in the air, his head lavished with attention in the wet heat of her mouth.

Her lips, so gentle and sweet on his face, closed around his cock like plush steel, heated velvet. When she sucked on him, swallowed, pulled back to lap at the precome flowing from his tip, he let out a choked grunt, his stomach jerking with the sudden sensation. He could have sworn she smiled as she slid her mouth back down his cock. Her hand left his stomach and instead crept down to cup his sack in her palm. He let out a short, sharp, exhale as she stroked the cleft between his balls, ran a fingernail up the divide, rolled them in her hand.

He wanted to throw his head back, to close his eye, to give in to his body’s need for movement, but the refrain in his head was no longer  _gaping wound disgust blame your fault your fault gaping wound_ \- it was her voice, her words,  _look at me look at me_  over and over again, commanding but yearning. Made soft with feeling, with the need for proof.

He couldn’t bear to look away now.

“Blossom,” he breathed, reaching down to stroke her hair from her face. “Blossom,  _petal_ , you should-” but her reply was a final, purposeful lick up the underside of his shaft, a press of her tongue into his slit, and then he was coming. Spilling molten and choking over her tongue, down her throat. Salt and heat and desire on her tongue. She swallowed, over and over, eyes burning into his, pulled the last of his release from him with a shattered breath that felt torn from his lungs. After one final suckling swalllow, as if she wanted to be certain she’d truly drained him, she pulled back, let his cock slide soft and sated from her lips. He sighed again, shuddering and breathy from the strength of his release. “Oh, petal,” he gasped, stroking her hair as she wiped her mouth. “Petal, you  _shouldn’t_ have.”

“You didn’t look away,” she reminded him, rising just enough to climb onto the bed. “I was rewarding you.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, either,” he murmured lowly. She shook her head. He let his arm twine around her waist again, and her arm went to his neck. Closer, closer, they came, until she was perched on his lap once more, until her face was pressed into his chest. Until they were lying entwined in their bed, him curled around her and her so close to him it seemed as though she might disappear into his skin.

“I love you,” she whispered into the space over his heart. “I loved you then, I love you now.”

“As I love you, blossom,” he sighed.

They slept through the day, and when the moon rose, he could almost forget his lack in the darkness. He could see it so clearly in any light, even the sliver of the moon.

He asked if she had preferred him whole. If she’d wanted him more then.

She smiled and shook her head and kissed the question from his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> There are supposed to be twelve chapters- one for each month- and I posted this one on tumblr in January, but I missed February so you'll likely be getting February and March around the same time (whenever that will be)
> 
> Alstroemeria is a January-blooming flower which represents love and devotion.  
> Adhesion is another word for scar tissue.


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